Plaidophile

Today I decided to restart MGS4, and in 3 hours I passed through act 1, finally. Then in another hour or so I finally got through all the long-ass cutscenes before act 2.

What the hell, Kojima.

I just love how iTunes crashes and then leaves its database in an inconsistent state where you have to rebuild it to ever use iTunes again.

I also love how iTunes keeps its smart playlist configuration in the database, seeing as how I have a lot of carefully-written smart playlists which I use for seeding my iPod and the like.

iTunes is such a piece of crap.

I think I'm burnt out on the Internet. After a certain point it's all just bland and samey, and it feels like a bunch of bickering and hurt feelings and retardation. It's such a freaking time-sink, too.

I enjoy making and reading comics, and I enjoy making and listening to music, and the Internet generally makes all four of those activities better and more accessible. Maybe I'll just stick to those things.

So, today was my one-year anniversary at the new job. Yay! I forgot my security badge.

The funny thing is that the exact same thing happened on my first anniversary at Amazon too. Weird.

I only even thought to check whether this was my anniversary when I realized that the only time I'd ever forgotten my badge at Amazon was on my anniversary and thought, hey, didn't I start this job sometime around August 27?

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i am tired

CJ asks, "Do ninjas have an equivalent to [something timely]?"

Well CJ, I'm glad you asked that. We don't have [something timely], instead we have [ninjumething timely]. It's just like your [something timely], except instead of doing [mundane tasks], you have to watch out for the [four-armed fire-breathing tasks], with sword-carrying midgets on their backs. I remember the first time I took out a [task] with only a single shuriken!

Then you have the [ranché thicept]. It's like a [random thing] and a [cliché concept] combined, only they're invisible. Man, I tell you, you do not want to get on their bad sides.

Finally, there's an all-out battle royale between every ninja while completing the [timely event]. Of course you can't see it because everything moves so fast, and when you do see something it is probably your own body. Because your head has been cut off. From it.

Well CJ, thank you for your question! I look forward to [question-related verb]ing you soon!

Arrived at the airport a couple hours early. Drank at the airport bar until I felt wobbly (which was just one "pint" where apparently this place thinks that pint is the same thing as a quart, not that I'm complaining since holy hell that was a lot of Hefeweisen for $5). Had a quick early dinner when there was half an hour before original boarding time. Finished early dinner, found out the flight's delayed an hour. I would just go back to the bar but I won't hear delay updates from there. Sigh.

Oh yeah, today for the first time ever while waiting for The Church of Beethoven's weekly show to start, I finally saw something in the wild:

Okay, so Dreamhost has been making various changes to their email setup which is making the whole spam situation a losing battle, so for now I'm trying out gmail for domains. The nice thing about this is I can finally use my beesbuzz.biz address to log in to Google things (reader, posting comments on Blogger, etc.). If it works out for beesbuzz.biz I'll probably switch my other domains over as well.

Migrating email is a pain in the butt though. (The stupid migration tool only works if you have everything in a single gigantic POP folder. I've kept my stuff in a pretty decent time-based hierarchy and simply copying those hierarchies over leads to other weirdness.)

So today, stuff happened outside of SWA's control, in that a flight was delayed and that completely messed up connections. Most airlines would simply disclaim any liability for it and make it seem like they were doing me a favor in putting me on standby for some crappy flight 6 hours later, but SWA actually went out of their way to find me a replacement flight as soon as they could — and they were ready for it because as soon as they knew that my first flight was delayed, they had looked to see which passengers would be affected by the delay. And, the replacement flight only pushed me back by about an hour and a half, and there was absolutely no trouble with my checked luggage either (in fact my bag was one of the first off the carousel at my final destination!).

So, thank you, Southwest Airlines, for keeping a crappy situation from being something difficult.

I think the only thing I can complain about SWA-wise is that when I did arrive at my new connection, the next flight had already boarded, because they just decided, "Hey, the flight isn't full, no sense making people wait around until 20 minutes before the flight in the name of crowd control." So I didn't get as good of a seat as I could have. Oh darn. It's pretty hard to get upset at something which generally improved things for everyone.

• Going to great lengths to reuse plastic luggage tags through three different home addresses
• In order to do this, using a piece of an envelope from a bill rather than provide my own paper
• Adding further identification to my luggage by using a purple ribbon. Which came from a party favor from my cousin's wedding four years ago.
• Knowing exactly where this ribbon came from, and clearly remembering saving it thinking, "Hey, this might come in handy."

Watching a TV show/ad/movie/whatever and recognizing the majority of the loops used in the soundtrack, especially when they're just stock loops bundled with GarageBand or SoundTrack.

(Tonight's offender: Mythbusters)

So, all the patents for the neat inventiony stuff I did on Kindle seem to be available on WIPO's site now. Should I make that one entry I wrote about it a while ago public? I'm still concerned that Amazon might want to bring down The Mighty Fist of Justice on me for that.

I guess I could just link to the patent filings but they seem like such a sterile way of describing it, and even my eyes glaze over reading them.

Quick poll: when you see this documentation in a cross-platform image-handling API:

width: Specifies the width of the image. All implementations support images that are at least 64 pixels wide.

what do you think that means in terms of valid parameters to be passed into the width parameter?

I am way overdue for a checkup and need to renew my albuterol prescription. There are a lot of doctors in my neighborhood. However, finding one which is accepting new patients and accepts my insurance is difficult. (It's mostly the fault of my insurance provider; while they provide national coverage, they only really focus on ones in the NYC metro area, because the particular division of the company I work for is headquartered in NYC and New Yorkers seem to have this notion that there isn't anything outside of NYC. But at least there's national coverage — when I actually worked in NYC my coverage only covered the tri-state area, meaning when I got sick while visiting my grandpa I was pretty much SOL. There seems to be something odd about New York's insurance laws which make this happen.)

So anyway, I can get a provider list for doctors near my apartment with no problem, but the phone numbers they provide seem to be incorrect or home phone numbers or something (for example, taking a few random doctors' numbers and popping them into Google's phonebook search finds residential numbers with completely different names), and when I look on their various hospital affiliations' sites, I can't find any mention of these doctors at all, telling me that their national database is extremely outdated, to say the least.

Basically, my insurance sucks.

I'm tempted to just order the albuterol from a gray-market New Zealand pharmacy since it'd cost the same as my prescription copay anyway...

Lately I've noticed that a lot of people are confused about what a hash table is and how one goes about implementing it. (This often comes up when I'm interviewing candidates and I ask them how they'd implement an associative array without the use of std::map.)

A hash table is not using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to order it in an associative array/sorted list/etc.

A hash table is using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to index into a linear, non-sparse array.

So, I decided to try out MobileMe to try to keep my calendars and contacts in sync between my three computers (two Mac, one Windows) and my iPhone. So far it's been quite aggravating.

At the core of it, the primary problem is just that the computers all do pull-based sync, and they don't do a very good job of handling contention. The Mac clients just spinlock forever waiting for the others to complete, and the Windows client puts up a very annoying dialog box right in the middle of the screen telling me I "can't sync now" because another computer is trying to sync. This happens about every 15 minutes, and there is no option to suppress it.

Meanwhile, the reason I decided to try this is because I finally got sick of Plaxo's less-than-stellar capabilities (its Outlook sync is merely tolerable, there's no direct iPhone sync, and it doesn't preserve alerts when syncing calendar events so the whole point to syncing my calendars goes out the window anyway).

I suppose I could just switch to syncing all my computers manually for now until Apple gets its collective head out of its butt regarding user experience. Argh.

(Of course if this were a true push solution it wouldn't be a problem — the only contention issue is while a client is pushing an update up to the server, and that's not likely to happen simultaneously. In the rare event that it does, the second one can just wait.)

So today I tried commuting via Harrison and dang if it wasn't extremely easy both ways. It's pretty much flat (it manages to miss all the hills entirely). The way to work took 20 minutes (even though I missed the turn onto Division and had to loop in an extra couple of blocks), and the way home took around 25-30 (I forgot to check my start time but I think I left work around 6:50 and I got home at 7:15... there is a gentle incline pretty much the whole way that accounts for the 5-10-minute difference).

A really nice thing about Harrison is that there's a bike path for pretty much the whole distance there, and Division and Townsend are both wide and have bike-friendly affordances. Plus, Mission and 24th are both pretty slow-moving so I have no trouble keeping up with traffic. Harrison does have a lot of stop signs, though, and most bicyclists just breeze through them (on the way down this morning I stopped which turned out to be even more confusing and dangerous due to other cyclists in the bike lane and drivers who didn't know what to do about different cyclists doing things differently), so on the way home I took the middle (if illegal) ground of slowing down on my approach and only stopping if someone else (car, pedestrian, or other cyclist) was ready to cross. That way worked out pretty well.

Also, strictly speaking a lot of the stop signs on the way to work don't quite apply to the bike lane, since they're three-way stops and there's no way for traffic to cross the bike lane's path, and in those cases the bike lane's marker extends through the whole intersection (but I hadn't encountered this situation before so I was a bit confused). Although when going by the Best Buy it's a bit strange because it's legally a 3-way intersection but then the driveway to Best Buy's parking lot makes for a fourth way, but the bike lane marker extends past the driveway too. That's one of those weird legal gray areas which I really have no idea what's the appropriate response, especially since there is the potential for cross traffic but it's not onto a street.

Oh, and no arguments or stressy bits today, even when I almost hit a dog which darted out into the crosswalk in front of me this morning. ("Fortunately" the owner was completely clueless and she didn't see me coming or nearly hit her either, as she was messing with her phone...)

Oh, also, at the end of the day, when I did get home, hauling my bike up the stairs wasn't a problem at all. Whee! And i didn't even need my inhaler today!

So, I was riding up Folsom on my new bike, and actually keeping up with traffic (about 20MPH) and otherwise completely following the law, when an asshole in a black BMW was speeding (at 40MPH or so) and came within inches of hitting me. So I shouted, "Hey!!!" at him. He immediately pulled over half a block in front of me, jumped out of his car, and shouted, "WHAT, HUH?!" (or maybe it was "YOU WANT SOME?!" but my adrenaline was pumping so I'm not really clear on what he said precisely) at me and held his arm out at roughly head level.

I ducked under his arm (clearly he wasn't trying that hard to knock me off my bike) and continued on my way. When he caught up with me the bike lane had started and I guess he decided I wasn't worth killing someone over after all since he didn't do anything specific to try to mess with me after that.

But, still, I can't understand how someone can break the law and nearly hurt someone else and then get offended when they're called on it. Jeeze.

(No, I didn't get his license plate number. It all went very fast. But now that I've seen this SFPD bike video I know better what to do.)

Today was my first day with the bike commute. I have now quickly discovered how hard it is to ride on somewhat-bumpy roads on a bike with no shock absorption, teeny tires on small wheels, and a freaking hard seat.

So I'm tempted to just get one of these.

I am now entirely moved out of my old place, and the leasing office already found someone who will be moving in on the 25th — so I'll actually get a bit of money back even with the early lease termination. Woo!

Also I finally found my bike helmet (it was packed alongside the George Foreman grill, which makes perfect sense if you think about it, although I leave deriving this as an exercise to the reader) so now I can start commuting by bike.

The accelerometer calibration screen of Labyrinth Lite makes an excellent carpentry level. (iPhone EDGE and iPod Touch only.)

I can understand Comcast filtering incoming ports 25 and 80, but 22? Being able to ssh home from work is exceedingly useful. Oops, never mind, it's something stupid with my 802.11n bridge. Argh. I blame Netgear instead.

This is weird though. I can ssh across the bridge on my local network just fine, but I can't if the connection originates from outside the network. However, I can ssh to a different box which is connected via 802.11n from the head end of the bridge. Gah.

7:50 Okay, got it working, somehow. Weird.